TPM based Secure Boot in Embedded Systems

Today embedded systems are becoming more and more sophisticated and are being used in a wide range of technologies across an array of industries. Therefore its security has become a major concern. Security is always an important and crucial task required to keep all threats or attacks away from the system. It is an extensive and constantly evolving domain. However, there are still some unexplored security aspects that may need our attention and one of them is hardware-based security. Hardware-based security enhances security by using a combination of trusted hardware and software components. In this paper, we introduce a detailed secure boot procedure based on the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for embedded systems, which aims to achieve hardware security. Without TPM based signature verification, the system cannot boot up, thus preventing the code from getting modified and ensuring that the system always boots up in a well-defined manner. We have tested our approach on different types of embedded systems to provide better results about boot time variations and have also discussed about system updates when the secure boot feature is enabled.